Chapter 17
When Jay, Archie, and Harper got back to the dorm, the three teens split and went in their separate directions. Harper went up to her room to relax with some yoga, which Teresa and Atlanta, who'd just gotten back from shopping, quickly volunteered to join. Archie disappeared into his room, muttering about working on something. Jay stood in the hallway until he heard each door snap shut, then meandered into the livingroom, where he promptly dropped onto the couch across from the TV.
He didn't turn the tv on, instead he kinda just stared into space as he processed his thoughts. The entire walk home, Harper and Archie had been overly conscious of him. Or at least it felt that way. They'd argued about the magazine that Harper had gotten, about Archie's authenticity as a poet, about who won the race they'd taken yesterday morning—but it still felt like they were fighting for his benefit. He'd listened, or tried to, for the first few minutes, but the oracle's words were weighing on his mind.
Someone was going to betray him. But who? And why?
It wasn't until he'd felt Harper's gentle tug on his sleeve that he even realized they'd made it back to the dorm, and he had nearly walked right past it for the second time that day.
Now the doubting questions came back into his mind, slowly but surely making him lose his appetite even though he'd forgotten to eat lunch.
"Hey! Earth to Jay! Come in, Jay?"
"Huh? What?" Jay blinked at the fingers snapping in front of his nose for a second before swatting the hand away and finding Odie smirking at him.
"Well that took long enough," the shorter boy said with a laugh, then dropped into the arm chair. "What's up?"
"Uh... Nothing," Jay said.
"Anyone ever tell you, you're a terrible liar?" Odie asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. Then he frowned and turned serious. "I know how to make the tools work."
"What?" Jay asked, thoroughly confused.
"The tools Harper found," Odie said in a whisper. "I know how her teammate made them-or well, some of them. I'm almost there."
"Some of them?"
Odie leaned back with a shrug as he laced his fingers behind his head. "Each design was created just differently enough that the counterparts of a different set won't cooperate with the calibration units of a different design by simply swapping out a piece of the machine. You see, the-"
"Uh, Odie?" Jay said quickly before this became a lesson in physics.
"Right, sorry," Odie said, sounding a little disappointed, but he smiled again and motioned for Jay to follow as he got to his feet. "C'mon, I'll show you."
Jay hesitated for a second, then shrugged and got up, joining him at the doorframe. "Sure, we have an hour til dinner right?"
"Yeah," Odie said with a laugh. "Though, last I saw Athena, she was as distracted as you are and running out to see Aphrodite.."
Before Jay could question Odie's observation, the front door swung open and Herry came quickly striding into the dorm with a glass of something that could have been a melted blue-raspberry slurpy.
"Hey, Herry," Jay said as their teammate went for the stairs.
"What's in the cup?" Odie asked.
"Oh, hey guys," Herry said, blinking at them as though he hadn't noticed them there. "Have you seen Harper?"
"She's upstairs doing yoga," Jay said. "Why?"
"Isn't she great?" Herry gushed and started up the stairs two at a time. "I can't wait to show her this lemonade!"
"Uhh..." Jay and Odie watched him go with slacked jaws, then exchanged glances.
"Oookay then," Odie said finally with a shrug of confusion, then led the way to the downward stairs. "That was new."
"Yeah," Jay agreed. "And weird."
"Guess it could be worse," Odie said with a laugh, shoving open the door to his high-tech room.
Jay was always impressed when he walked into his teammate's room. It looked like Odie had just bought out a software store or raided a crime lab-or both. It was definitely a tech-minded person's dream, and Odie was perfectly at home in it as he went gliding across the floor in his desk chair.
"Ok," Odie said, keying a few commands to unlock the system. "Like I was saying before, we know that the pieces in the box don't work together, right?"
"Yeah," Jay said, sitting on Odie's bed (the only part of the room that didn't look like it was from the future). "At least, that's what Harper told us."
"She's right," Odie said, not even looking away from his large screens. "I tested them-no dice. So I used an engineering program I created for shop class to render everything into data files."
"Ok," Jay said slowly, watching as the images appeared. "How does that help us?"
Before he answered, the images on the computer rearranged themselves to show a 3D replica that floated from the screen as a projection in the center of the room. With the exception of it glowing and floating in the air, the hologram looked almost exactly like the one Harper had shown them. Odie got up, pinching his chin and frowning as he analyzed it. Then he ran his finger along the top of the gun's barrel where there was an intricate design of swirls.
"You see this?" Odie asked. "This is what had me thrown off for so long."
"So long?" Jay repeated. "Odie, it's been one day."
"I know," Odie said, giving Jay a blank look before continuing. "I thought it had been done for basic design-to match her personality or something. But when you analyze the microscopic proportions of the quad-uh-of the spirals, it creates an amplifier to withstand radioactivity-"
"Radioactivity?" Jay echoed in alarm, the stone in his pocket might as well have started burning.
"Yeah," Odie said, eyeing Jay curiously. "When you think about it, though, that's probably the wrong word for it-because I'm sure that radio waves are too large for the vibrations actually rebounding off the stones. But that's something to look into later."
"Uh... Good idea."
"So, anyway," Odie said, spinning around in his chair to face his computer screens. "If I can breakdown the substructural base coding of the microprocessing unites in the sensor recovery units of each piece, I should be able to replicate the interchangeble parts by adjusting the ionic settings of each device. That is, of course, assuming that he really did base the data functions on each individual's DNA."
Jay blinked. Of the entire team, he seemed to be the one who could manage to follow a majority of Odie's reasonings-but today he was totally stumped.
"Odie?" he called to the shorter boy as he dropped back, pinching the bridge of his nose as his head hit the opposite end of the mattress. Today was turning into a very long day, and it wasn't dinner time yet. "Can I trust you with something-that you won't tell the others?"
"Sure," Odie said with a small laugh, which pointed out that his friend should never have needed to ask. "What's up?"
Not even moving to sit up, Jay fished the rock out of its pocket with his free hand and held it in the air. He could easily imagine Odie's face, mouth open and eyes wide with shock for a few seconds before that intensely thoughtful expression could return as he scooted closer.
Had he opened his eyes, Jay wasn't all that far off, neglecting only the fact that Odie's glasses slid down his nose and the boy had to adjust them before he wheeled his chair close enough that it loudly bumped Jay's knees. Jay was instantly sitting up again, grimacing as he rubbed his knee caps. Odie, though, was entranced, staring at the stone as though it was something of a holy grail.
The shock and awe quickly melted away to a thoughtful frown as he looked at his teammate. "Hera doesn't think Iris is coming back, I take it?"
"Not anytime soon," Jay said with a shrug, motioning for Odie to take the Blue Chalcedony as his arm was starting to grow tired. But Odie was already too deep in though.
"And she doesn't trust all of us keeping quite about having that?" Odie asked.
Jay nodded. "She said I had to be careful of who I trusted this time around."
The smaller boy blinked at him, then smirked. "Well it's nice to know I made the cut!"
"Funny," Jay said and rolled his eyes.
Odie curled up into a thoughtful pose, pinching his chin with his right hand while his right arm braced his elbow, absently scooting himself back across the room to his computers. The next thing Jay knew, Odie's hands were flying across the keyboard and, with a strange sound that reminded Jay of a space movie, a metal pillar started rising from the floor.
"Set it on the electromagnetic—," Odie paused and glanced at Jay's blank face with a sheepish smile. "Sorry, balance it on the spikes."
Jay raised an eyebrow and was about to ask what he was talking about, when the top of the pillar opened to allow a metallic structure (that reminded him of a bird's claws) to rise up as a stand. He raised an eyebrow at the smaller teen, but set the stone down in the center.
As soon as Jay's hand left the stone, Odie was typing away controls that set up a clear cage around it. Jay regarded the trapped stone for another moment, then turned to the younger teen. "You sure it'll be safe in there?"
Odie took a moment to type a few more commands, before turning to Jay with a superior expression as he raised an eyebrow. "That's an electrified screening-even though it looks like plastic-and base, both made of an alloy I've put together: barium cobalt, tugsten, nibriturim and-for good measure-a little titanium," he said proudly. "This baby ain't going anywhere."
Jay nodded, satisfied and definitely impressed once again by his genius teammate, even if he hadn't followed much of anything he'd said. "Alright," he said, glancing at his watch. "We should probably head upstairs-dinner's probably in five minutes."
"Yeah, yeah, hold on a second," Odie said, spinning back to his computer screens to start up a few programs. "Let me just initialize readings."
"Okay," Jay said, leaning against the door frame. "Oh, and Odie?"
"There's no stone in my room and I was explaining crotonic plasma generators," Odie offered, spinning around again to grin as the displayed stone sunk back beneath the floor again. "Yeah, I know."
A/N: Sorry about the long wait! If you've tuned in to my Angelina story, then you've already heard that my computer is the grandmother of all technology and thus is beginning to fall apart. So posting/writing/all function is going a bit slow. But never fear! I'm still playing in the toybox ^_^